


Hail Mary

by Michael_McGruder



Series: Argadnel Series [1]
Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 09:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2576597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Michael_McGruder/pseuds/Michael_McGruder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dimension hopping in the Wildfire brings Arnold Rimmer to the doorstep of his family home, where he has the opportunity to make a drastic difference in the life of one of his childhoods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hail Mary

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't intended to start another story before I finished the one in progress, however this narrative was particularly insistent.

Dimension 955.63.552

 

The Wildfire encountered minimal turbulence during this jump, and checking the local date, Rimmer could see why. 14 November, 2351, 9:12 am, orbiting Io. He would have only been seven years old. Rimmer was bewildered as to why the Wildfire would have directed him here.

After taking the helm of the Wildfire, Rimmer was forced to learn its quirks as he went. One of those happened to be super-friction between realities, a potentially fatal consequence of dimension jumping. The closer the circumstances of the reality the Wildfire was jumping to as compared to the one he was leaving, the closer the possibility of the Wildfire turning into a flaming comet.

Playing it safe, Rimmer always programmed the Wildfire for maximum burn jumps, reducing the risk to practically zero. It did leave him in some strange realities though.

The Wildfire was floating in geosynchronous orbit with his childhood home. His curiosity piqued, Rimmer activated the ship’s cloaking systems and looked for a place to park.

 

Rimmer looked out upon the front garden of his former house from the idling cockpit of his ship. Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary, but Rimmer couldn’t shake the feeling in his gut that something was hideously wrong.

He saw his father coming out of the house, and every simulated muscle in Rimmer’s hologramatic body tightened rigidly. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but his reaction surprised him.

He realized this was the first time he’d seen his father since he was 19. Since his father, acting as his instructor, had bullied him out of Io Polytechnic.

Arthur Rimmer strolled out of the house, looking at ease with himself. He locked the front door, meandered to the mail box, depositing some envelopes, and finally walked to his car, not seeming to be in any particular hurry to do anything.

The sinking, twisted feeling in Rimmer’s gut amplified for no reason he could rationalize. When his father finally drove away, Rimmer jumped out of the cockpit and practically ran to the front door.

Using his skeleton key, he unlocked the door and stepped inside, pausing in the foyer. It didn’t sound as if anyone else was home, but the smell nearly choked him. In the often dangerous situations he managed to get himself into, Rimmer had become all too familiar with the smell of burnt flesh.

He followed his nose to the kitchen and felt his stomach drop.

Laying on the floor in front of the stove was Arnold Rimmer, age seven. His pale face had swollen red welts on top of vivid purple bruises covering older yellow splotches. Fresh tracks of blood trailed down his nose and lips. Stretch marks ran down the boy’s alarmingly thin legs. His own had faded in time, but it was jarring to see them fresh.

The boy’s right arm was in a cast, and the skin on the palm of his left hand was charred black. Rimmer could see burnt layers of flesh still stuck to the stove burner. If he could have been sick, he probably would have been.

Rimmer dropped to his knees, checking the boy for a pulse. It was rapid and weedy, but it was there. His skin felt clammy and cold, and he wasn’t breathing. Rimmer shed his gold bomber jacket and wrapped the boy in it to combat shock, and started mouth to mouth to get him breathing again.

Eventually the boy started breathing on his own, but remained unconscious. Rimmer scooped him up and tucked him in the cockpit of his ship. Within seconds the Wildfire was on a course to Ganymede.

Rimmer felt cold and shaken, and it took his brain a while to catch up with the autopilot his body was running on. Io was a small place, and Arthur would surely find him at Io General. The understanding that Rimmer had no intention of returning the young Arnold to that house started to filter through his numbed mind.

 

Rimmer checked the boy into the emergency room under the pretense of being his uncle, and was able to adequately bullshit his way through their initial questions. Now he sat in the waiting room, his stomach twisting itself in knots.

The final count for young Arnie J. was one broken nose, a dislocated jaw, numerous contusions and superficial abrasions, old and new, a ruptured spleen, and third degree burns on his left hand.

Ganymede Emergency’s facilities would have him out of recovery in four days, but even that felt infinitely too long for Rimmer. He was convinced that any moment his father or the authorities would take the boy back to that house.

Rimmer saw him the day after his surgery. He sat in the chair by the bed as the boy slept.

That’s how he kept thinking of him, as “the boy,” or “the kid.” It was hard acknowledging him as Arnold Rimmer, and faced with having to stand outside and autonomous from one’s self, Rimmer fumbled dumbly with emotions humans weren’t designed to experience. These emotions therefore had no name or description to identify them by. He felt like a drowning man who’d never seen the sea.

The younger Arnold eventually floated to the surface of consciousness, and Rimmer waited for him to notice him. He waited for a long time. Finally he coughed nervously, and the boy jumped in surprise, looking vaguely in his direction.

“Arnold?” A pause.

“Frank?” the boy guessed, but sensed that was wrong. “John?”

It didn’t take long for Rimmer to realize the boy was blind.

“The name’s Ace, kiddo,” he said, trying to muster up warm calm, though he was experiencing neither. “It looked like you were in a spot of bother, but you’re all patched up now.”

“Where am I? This isn’t Io General,” he said. Rimmer wondered how familiar the boy had become with IG, but not too hard.

“Ganymede Emergency,” he replied.

“Where’s my father?” Arnold asked in a small voice. Rimmer carefully put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“He’s not here. And I promise you, he will never, ever hurt you again.”

“You promise?” Arnold asked in a whisper.

“I promise.”

The boy’s face crumpled and tears spilled from his unseeing eyes. Rimmer brought him into a warm hug, and the boy clung to him like a lifeline. He seemed to trust him instinctively. Rimmer wondered if it was the Ace bravado, or more to do with those nameless alien feelings.

The night before Arnold was supposed to be discharged, Rimmer snuck him out of the hospital and they jumped as far as the Wildfire would take them.

It was around that time that Rimmer’s rational mind came back from lunch, and he started to panic.

 

The cockpit of a dimension hopping space ship belonging to the galaxy’s supposed James Bond/Errol Flynn was exactly the wrong place for a young child, especially an injured one. Cruising deep space, Rimmer tried to figure out where to go from here.

Arnold sat in the back seat as Rimmer explained as much as he felt would be safe to do so. He didn’t tell him that he was the adult version of the boy from an alternate universe, only that his name was Ace, and his job was to help people who needed it. Which was all true enough.

The young Arnold was reluctant at first to talk about his home life. What Rimmer could coax out of the boy all sounded fairly similar to his own childhood, except that his father’s violence was magnified by a fairly significant margin.

Arnold hadn’t been born blind, he’d lost his sight two years ago when he’d been thrown down a flight of stairs.

“I wasn’t being quiet enough when father was trying to nap,” the boy said, his voice thick with self recrimination.

It twisted Rimmer’s stomach to hear him blame himself for having been hurled down stairs, partly because the guilt was so familiar. Even now Rimmer fought with the deeply ingrained belief that he didn’t deserve happiness or success, that the only thing he deserved was punishment and failure.

He looked at this small broken boy and thought if there was anything, _anything_ , he could do in the multiverse to change that for just one version of himself, to give one boy a second chance, that alone would be worth having left Red Dwarf as Ace Rimmer.

 

After several weeks, Rimmer finally found what he was looking for in Dimension 333.276.551. It depressed Rimmer how long it took to find, but he didn’t allow himself to dwell on that for too long.

The Wildfire surreptitiously entered Europa’s atmosphere, local date 28 March, 2377. It glided silently towards the Rimmer residence.

It was a modest cottage in the Argadnel region, with a well tended garden, surrounded by oak trees.

Rimmer looked out upon the front garden of the house from the idling cockpit of his ship. He watched Yvonne McGruder, now Yvonne Rimmer, come out of the house, followed by a man who looked remarkably like Rimmer, holding a two year old child.

Yvonne kissed the child sweetly on the head, and gave her husband a lingering kiss before climbing in her car and driving off to work. This Arnold Rimmer watched her go, puppeteering his son’s arm, waving her good bye.

This Arnold Rimmer looked so much like himself, while entirely different in so many fundamental ways. Standing there in a comfy olive coloured cable knit sweater, khaki slacks, and worn brown loafers, rather than an over starched uniform and mirror polished combat boots, he looked so much more at ease with himself. None of the familiar anxiety or bitterness etched into his face. He looked content. Happy.

While the young Arnold napped, Rimmer knocked on the cottage door and tried to will away his nervousness. The Arnold Rimmer answering the door certainly didn’t expect a man in a gold bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses to be on the other side.

Rimmer took off his sunglasses and let the man stare at his face until realization dawned.

“Hi,” Rimmer said ineloquently. “I wondered if we could talk?”

 

Sitting in the living room with two cups of tea untouched on the coffee table, Rimmer gave himself the short version of why there were currently two of them in the same room. The man seemed confused, but willing to accept the story, given that there were in fact two of them in the same room.

Rimmer had sussed out that they’d had more or less the exact same childhood, and very nearly the same career, up until two years earlier. The difference was that, in this universe, this Arnold Rimmer hadn’t let Lister wind him up over McGruder’s head injury, and had phoned her up instead of waiting for her to phone him.

When he’d learned she was pregnant, he went to see her on Titan, and subsequently avoided a nuclear explosion to the face when the cadmium II leaked.

Rimmer tried to sidestep the bitterness at the fact that it could have been that easy. He nearly succeeded.

“Why are you here, though?” the man asked. Given that this Arnold had the same cold and sadistic parents, it was easy enough to explain the younger Arnold’s situation.

“Where else could he go? Where else would he have a chance?” Rimmer knew that Arnold Rimmer, age seven from dimension 955.63.552 was going to die in that kitchen, in that house.

As Arnold Rimmer rocked his son on his shoulder, he felt like he ought to have said, “I have to think about this,” he knew he should have said, “I need to talk to Yvonne,” but in his heart he knew he’d already made up his mind.

 

Rimmer brought the young Arnold into the warm house and introduced him to the older man.

“This is Arnold,” he said.

“That’s my name, too,” the boy replied, amused by the coincidence.

 

“It must be amazing,” the older Arnold said as Rimmer was leaving. “To travel the galaxy, travel dimensions. Be a space hero.” There was a wistful, giddy expression on the man’s face. “To think, that could have been me.”

Rimmer looked around at the homey cottage, the photographs filled with smiling faces, the two children who were going to grow up knowing they were loved, knowing that their lives had value.

“Believe me,” he said. “You are the lucky ones.”


End file.
